While America has stopped production of its stealth fighter, China prepares to challenge U.S. air supremacy in the Western Pacific with its own.

China is on another Long March, one it hopes will lead to military supremacy over the U.S. at least in the Western Pacific. It is deploying a carrier-killing mobile missile, the Dong Feng 21D, and is expected to launch its first aircraft carrier this year, the refurbished ex-Soviet carrier Varyag. China is also conducting preflight tests on a fifth-generation stealth fighter expected to challenge the best the U.S. has to offer.

Photographs reportedly showing China’s J-20 undergoing high-speed taxi tests at the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute in western China have appeared, first on unofficial Chinese and foreign defense-related websites. Such tests are the last stage before actual flight tests.

[…]China’s stealth fighter appears to have “the potential to be a competitor with the F-22 (Raptor) and to be decisively superior to the F-35,” according to Richard Fisher, a Chinese military expert with the International Strategy and Assessment Center in Washington. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the designated replacement for the Raptor, has had its troubles. The general in charge of the program was fired amid concerns of spiraling costs and program delays.

It was felt we couldn’t afford both an F-22 dedicated to air superiority and the F-35, even though the latter is vastly inferior in air-to-air combat and ground defense penetration. The Raptor is perhaps the only plane that could evade sophisticated surface-to-air missile defense systems such as Russia’s S-300 and S-400.

“Only the F-22 can survive in airspace defended by increasingly capable surface-to-air missiles,” declares Air Force Association President Mike Dunn. The F-22 can fly 300 to 400 mph faster and two miles higher than the F-35. The F-35 is cheaper, but you get what you pay for. And it’s still under development. The F-22 is operational now, when we need it.

[…]During recent military exercises with South Korea, the F-22 was conspicuous by its absence. Deploying a squadron of F-22s to Osan Air Base in South Korea would send a powerful “keep off the grass” message to Beijing and Pyongyang. So why haven’t we done it? Why haven’t we sent the world’s most advanced combat aircraft into any potential combat zone?

Perhaps because letting the F-22 Raptor prove its worth would be a visible reminder of the stupidity of building only 187 of them in a world where the Russians and Chinese are building their own stealth fighters, and thugocracies like Iran and North Korea go nuclear. It would be a reminder that the once-feared arsenal of democracy needs some serious retooling.

Let me be clear. The F-35 is overpriced junk. We should immediately resume, and even max out, production of the F-22 Raptor. That’s what Obama would be doing if he cared a whit about national security, and didn’t have his head stuck in the sand. We need more F-22s, and we need them yesterday and we need them deployed to South Korea and Japan yesterday.

It is perfectly obvious that Iran’s latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent).

It will… make meaningful sanctions more difficult.

[…]But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs’ nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran’s program.

The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.

Krauthammer then explains what drove Brazil and Turkey to abandon US interests and side with Iran.

He writes:

They’ve watched America acquiesce to Russia’s re-exerting sway over Eastern Europe, over Ukraine (pressured by Russia last month into extending for 25 years its lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and over Georgia (Russia’s de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no longer an issue under the Obama “reset” policy).

They’ve watched our appeasement of Syria, Iran’s agent in the Arab Levant — sending our ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies Hezbollah with Scuds, and intensifies its role as the pivot of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of the U.S. and its interests? Ever more eager U.S. “engagement.”

They’ve observed the administration’s gratuitous slap at Britain over the Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the Czech Republic and Poland, and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And in Latin America, they see not just U.S. passivity as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez organizes his anti-American “Bolivarian” coalition while deepening military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active U.S. support in Honduras for a pro-Chavez would-be dictator seeking unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that country.

What Brazil and Turkey just did wasn’t intended to impede Tehran, but to make it harder for Western powers to impose sanctions. Both countries want Iran to run interference for them.Once Iran gets the bomb and takes the (slight) heat, Brazil and Turkey both intend to go nuclear.

Brazil wants vanity nukes to cement its position as South America’s hegemon, a regional alternative to the US. Turkey’s slow-roll Islamist government dreams of a new Ottoman age — as it turns from the West to embrace the Muslim states it ruled a century ago. After easing Tehran’s path to the bomb, Ankara will claim that it needs its own nuclear capability to maintain regional stability.

But the coming widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons will be profoundly destabilizing. Each Middle Eastern country, especially, that goes nuclear increases the probability of a nuke exchange exponentially.

As Western states fantasize about a “nuclear-weapons-free world,” their developing-world darlings are scrambling like mad to develop nuclear arsenals. And we don’t get it.

Obama’s foreign policy is basically 100% naivete. Brazil and Turkey just switched sides. And why not? They know that the US is a paper tiger under Obama. That’s why we’ve suffered FIVE terrorist attacks under Obama, but NONE under Bush following his military response to the 9/11 attack in Afghanistan and Iraq.

US lawmakers urged authorities in India’s eastern state of Orissa to prosecute perpetrators of violence against Christians, saying the nation’s reputation for tolerance was at stake.

In a letter to the state’s Chief Minister Navin Patnaik released Friday, the lawmakers voiced concern that many perpetrators of last year’s violence were still at large and intimidating their victims.

More than 100 Christian were killed and thousands more left homeless between August and October 2008 following the murder of a revered Hindu holy man, which was blamed on Christians.

While praising recent statements by India’s central government, the lawmakers said that local authorities have sometimes turned away victims seeking redress.

“Such attacks on the fundamental freedom of religion threaten not only India’s reputation for religious diversity, but also the very stability of India’s secular democracy,” the 21 lawmakers, led by Republican Trent Franks, wrote in the letter sent late last month.

“Given the recent experience with religiously inspired terrorism, we are concerned that if Hindu extremists can act with impunity toward religious minorities in India, these extremists and their ideologies will begin to affect international security as well.”

Christians account for 2.3 percent of the billion-plus population in India, which is majority Hindu but officially secular.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan official advisory panel, in August placed India on its watch list, citing violence against Christians in Orissa and Muslims in the western state of Gujarat.

The move brought swift condemnation from India, an emerging US ally, which said the nation had an independent judiciary and vigilant media to pursue any aberrations from its secular, multi-religious principles.

It may be useful to listen to the recent debate between Hindus and Christians that I summarized, in which two Hindus explain their view of human rights and how religious minorities should be treated. In some parts of India, if you do not accept the Hindu concept of polytheism, then you are opening yourself up to violence from Hindu extremists. On the other hand, the election of the Congress Party and the rejection of the BJP Party was a good sign that the bulk of Indians are more tolerant that the militant Hindus.

Still more Chopra invective surfaced in The Washington Post this September, again targeting [Rick] Warren and reflecting the charm of the Left. “The abuse delivered by right-wing Christians is such an old story that we are long past irony,” Chopra wrote, before moving on to his favorite target.

“The Rev. Rick Warren has a record for trying to smooth the waters, but he also flirts with intolerance — toward gay marriage, for instance — and since his rationale is that a ‘loving’ God shares the same prejudices, what’s to stop others with worse tempers from following the same logic? When your God hates, you have permission to hate,” Chopra wrote.

When your guru hates, I guess that gives you permission to hate as well?

I think it’s encouraging that the bulk of Hindus seem to be moving away from the view of intolerant extremists like Deepak Chopra and the Hindu militants in Orissa.